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Zombies Crawled Through The 'Burg On Sunday (But Florida Had A Real Zombie)

While you were laying on a roof somewhere and eating a hot dog on Sunday, zombies briefly occupied the neighborhood as part of the annual NYC Zombie Crawl. Participants donned head to toe zombie makeup and tattered clothing and traveled from Trash Bar to Grand Victory, McCarren Park, Spike Hill, and Public Assembly. The first stop had had makeup artists for the not-so-DIY-ers, while the other stops had live music, contests, drink specials, and giveaways.

As horrifying as some of the Brooklyn zombies may have looked, nothing comes close to the real life “zombie” incident that same day. As you’ve probably read by now, Florida police shot and killed a naked man who was eating the face of another man on the side of a causeway. Not only was he consuming human flesh, but it took multiple bullets to take him out. Authorities believe he was in a drug-induced paralysis, but if that doesn’t sound like the beginning of a George Romero film, we don’t know what does.

For those of you interested, zombies originate from the voodoo tradition in which priests used rituals and powders to turn enemies into the “walking dead.” The term “zombie” first appeared in print in 1792 as a Creole word meaning spirit, but unlike other Hollywood monsters like the werewolf or vampire, the zombie as we know it today has no literary tradition. The creatures first appeared in film in 1932’s White Zombie.